05 December 2016 3:45 PM

I mistrust too much anger in politics. A bit is all right, especially when the other side are telling lies or refusing to listen. But not too much. And not too much self-righteousness either, please. None of us is right all the time. That’s why we have a Loyal Opposition and an adversarial Parliament, and the presumption of innocence, come to that.

Perhaps I am just too conscious of the horrors of Civil War. I am drawn to historical depictions of these wars, by a fearful fascination. How did men of the same nation end up slaughtering each other? Could this happen among our gentle hills and woods? Yes, it could, and has. Start treating opponents as enemies, and there is no telling where it might end.

I live in a city that was besieged in such a war, and where you can still, if you look carefully, find traces of old fortifications in now-peaceful suburbs. I have read, in history and in fiction, depictions of these events, of the horrible relentless inevitability with which the two sides have first ceased to listen to each other, then turned their backs on each other and finally begun killing each other. The past, as Evelyn Waugh once said, is the only thing we possess for certain. We should pay close attention to it.

… full of pain and regret at the turning of Englishman against Englishman:

‘And the raw astonished ranks stand fast

To slay or to be slain

By the men they knew in the kindly past

That shall never come again’

You might find something a little similar in Gore Vidal’s rather beautiful description (in his novel ‘Lincoln’) of Abraham Lincoln visiting wounded Confederate prisoners of war. One of the badly-injured young men, unlikely to survive and in some pain, turns away from him in loathing and disgust. ‘Son, we are all the same at the end’, says the unhappy President, quietly. The reader alone knows how true this will be, and how soon. It is in this book that Lincoln, driven to misery and self-loathing by the carnage he must pursue to the end, rages that the very rooms in which he works and sleeps seem to have filled up with blood.

And these episodes are nothing to the Civil Wars of Russia and Spain, both in our times, adding modern weapons to pre-mediaeval cruelty. Not to mention the merciless wars of Ireland in the early part of this century, and their more recent sequels.

at the end of last week, I did not know until I was at my keyboard how very much I felt that some sort of generosity was called for. If you love your country – and this is the only real motivation for wanting its independence – then you also love your fellow countrymen and your fellow countrywomen. Therefore if you disagree with them , you seek to do so with patience, kindness and tolerance, and a readiness to listen. So what if they don't do the same? 'Render unto no man evil for evil'.

To me, for many years, the most moving part of any election has been the victor’s declaration (not always made) to serve *all* his constituents, whether they voted for him or not – and my own (Labour) MP has been an exemplary follower of this principle, to my personal knowledge. Heaven help us if it is ever otherwise.

Most sensible pro-EU people now recognise that the vote went against them and that we must therefore leave the EU.

I have mocked those who did not recognise the outcomeof the referendum and fantasised about frustrating the result, reminding them of Brecht’s joke about how, the people having failed the elite, the elite would like to elect a new people. Too bad. Once you accept the democratic principle, the majority is the absolute decider.

They, like those who wanted to leave, took part in the campaign on that basis. But of course it was never quite as simple as that , especially in a free, plural society with a de facto separation of powers, adversarial newspapers, law courts, a powerful civil service and the BBC,

Would leavers, had we lost, have accepted the vote? Yes. Would we have sunk back and given up all hope of leaving forever? I somehow doubt it. We would also have continued to seek to block many aspects of EU membership, such as Schengen and the Euro, Turkish or Ukrainian membership of the EU and any plans for a European Army.

Remainers are now doing the approximate equivalent. Do I blame them? No. What is more, they have quite a lot to work on. It is silly to pretend that they don’t. Let me explain.

Be in no doubt that there are many and varied ways of achieving the apparently simple aim of leaving the EU. And that if that aim is badly messed up, there could one day even come a campaign to rejoin the EU, which will undo all you have achieved.

One of the many odd, unsatisfactory things about the referendum is that the movement which won it dissolved itself at the point of victory. We did not elect a new government (though we destroyed the old one, which has been replaced by a pale ghost of its former self). We cannot turn to the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign and say ‘what exactly did you mean to do next?’, because they are scattered to the winds, some in internal exile, some hidden inside the government, some fulminating in UKIP factions.

If we could ask them, what would they say? How deeply had they thought about the matter? Did they even have a unified position? Weren’t some of them globalists who wanted Britain out of the protective embrace of the EU so it could be more open to the keen winds blowing from the far East?

Weren’t others more my sort, who value Britain’s special unique nature and didn’t want to see it absorbed or erased or diluted either by the EU or by globalisation? These aren't really allies. they have a single negative desire - to get out of the EU. But their positive plans are hostile to each other.

Then there’s the question of responsibility. Victory in an election (as those who take part well know) means that you are now personally in charge of keeping the promises you made. Victory in a referendum has no such automatic price. We did not elect a new government last June. We just robbed the existing government of the central pillar of most of its activity, and forced it to do something it didn’t want to do and will do as slowly and unwillingly as it can. There is no force in British politics which can change that.

The Leave campaigners then either went home quietly, or began writing rude memoirs about their allies, or embarked on wild political manoeuvres, only to be rolled flat by the bizarre juggernaut of Theresa May, who inherited Downing Street because she had been vague and rather cowardly, and who was given the job of implementing a policy she opposed -presumably because she had opposed it more feebly than most.

We must also wonder, given their performance for many years before in front-line politics, whether *all* the major figures in the Leave campaign were in fact wholly committed to the cause they espoused; or whether they ever intended to win. I was utterly amazed when Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove declared themselves in favour of leaving. It was at that moment that my former certainty, that ‘Remain’ would win the vote, began to evaporate. I had actually argued with Mr Gove, many years before, that the main reason leaving the EU was unpopular was hat no leading politicians were in favour of it. The public therefore assumed that it was a dangerous policy. At the time, as I recall, he took the David Cameron view, that it was a marginal subject we shouldn't 'bang on' about.

Of course both sides were unscrupulous. But that's not worth worrying about. As so often, Larry Elliott of ‘The Guardian’ makes the key point very well. He disposes of Remainers’ moans about the untruths told by the ‘Leave’ campaign here

But this frivolous disregard for truth (on both sides) was partly a consequence of the irresponsibility I mention above. As soon as the campaign was over, both sides bolted back to their normal homes and loyalties, like vandals discovered in mid-crime by the police, scattering down every available dark alleyway, never to meet again.

I also have to mention the amazing predicament of the Labour Party, whose leader was ideally positioned to do as little as he could to discourage his party’s voters from registering a huge protest against mass immigration - one millions of them had been longing to make for years.

So, we have a narrow victory, based on unique circumstances, obtained largely by people who didn’t know (and hadn’t thought very hard about) what they were going to do next. Is this really a sound basis for a triumphalist parade? Not everyone on our side is brilliant and good. Not everyone on the other side is stupid or wicked. Fight them, by all means, but with reason and facts, not self-righteous rage. If the vote were held again now, it might just as easily go the other way. Is it wise to pretend to be unaware of that, or to think it just doesn’t matter?

And now, as a nation and an economy, we are up against an EU in which at least one very skilful and dogged rival, France, will do all she can to do us down. France has several reasons to do this. Her establishment wants to squash Marine le Pen’s Front National, and making an exit from the EU look hard and painful will help this process. Then there’s the little matter of the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, and French resentment (shared by Germany) of the continuing dominance of the City of London in European finance. Do you think they’re going to be nice to us?

And is it really not worth noting that figures such as Christopher Booker, the most sustained and well-informed campaigner against British membership of the EU, are genuinely worried that we might damage ourselves if we seek too much, too fast? The attitude of some on this blog has been close to Stalinist in their empurpled unreasoning wrath. Any minute now I expect to hear voices accusing me and Christopher Booker of wrecking railroads and sabotage, and of being secret agents of Brussels.

Sure, economic logic dictates that they want our markets. But the EU has always been a political body, with economics coming second to politics, or how could they have agreed to merge their currencies? Politics comes first. They cannot make it easy or cheap for us to leave. There will be a price of some sort.

Finally, I’d mention (as I did in my Sunday article) the fact that the ghastly embodiment of cynicism, the Conservative Party is still in office in this country. This is a party which is very good at political murder, as Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith could readily attest. Those Tories who push now for a hard and fast departure may find that Mrs May and her inner circle give them all the freedom they want, wait for them to fail, and then destroy them.

What might the result of that be? Let’s speculate wildly. A catastrophic failure of negotiations, a British walk-out, or a an EU refusal to concede another inch, a run on Sterling (which is waiting to happen again anyway), a humiliating return to talks (on worse terms) and then perhaps that long-threatened election, fought as a second referendum on the half-hearted deal we eventually get?

I don’t know, and nor do you. All I know is that I find the noisy, chest-thumping over-confidence of some Leavers increasingly hard to take. I think it is dangerous for the country and, regardless of whether anyone likes what I say or not, I am going to point this out.

20 November 2016 2:16 AM

Modern politicians don’t like taking responsibility for anything difficult. They hate the idea that you sometimes have to punish people. That’s understandable. Locking people up and making them work hard and do as they’re told isn’t very nice.

But if you can’t bear the burden, then don’t seek paid public office. These nasty tasks are the most basic duty of the State. If it won’t protect us from the wicked, then we might as well wind it up.

We have disarmed in the face of danger. Until about 50 years ago, the stated aim of prisons was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’. Under a clear criminal code, most crooks and most louts were scared of prison and tried not to go there. It wasn’t some savage place of torture and beatings.

By world standards our prisons were very civilised. But they were austere, disciplined and under the control of the authorities.

Then along came the liberal modernisers. Police were turned into paramilitary social workers, soft on crime, tough on professors’ wives trying to stop trees being cut down.

Judges were no longer allowed to punish anyone without checking first to see if they’d had a horrid childhood. Voluntary drug abuse was treated as an unavoidable disease, rather than as the crime it is.

How the criminals laughed. Prisons were transformed into apologetic, weakly run places where something called ‘rehabilitation’ would supposedly happen. It never has.

The point of prison was to scare people away from doing things they knew would put them there. Nobody had any fancy ideas about changing the hearts and minds of those who were actually locked up.

With a bit of luck they wouldn’t want to go back, but if they did, there was room.

It worked. In 1950-51, the prison population of England and Wales was 20,474. Even ten years later it was a manageable 27,099. Then along came the enlightened ones. By 1980, the total was almost 40,000. By 1999, the same approach (plus lots of unpaid fines, cautions and community service) had taken it to nearly 65,000. Now it is a little more than 85,000.

These places are far from being ‘holiday camps’. That is not the problem. Many of them are terrifying because the authorities have lost control, and the nastiest inmates are in charge.

I often wonder how those who are so squeamish about executing a few vicious murderers feel about the monstrous annual tally of despair – the prison suicide rate, now more than 100 a year.

But our bulging prisons are full in spite of huge numbers of crimes not reported because nobody is interested, of crimes ignored by the police, of offenders cautioned but not arrested, of ‘restorative justice’, of decisions not to prosecute by the CPS, suspended sentences, probation orders, automatically halved sentences, tagging and other devices for keeping criminals out of prison.

It’s quite simple. The feebler you are, the more crime you get.

And in the end the crime so outstrips the space in prisons that you more or less give up. That is what we have done.

And if we don’t rediscover our nerve, our prisons and our country are heading fast towards the Third World, but without the sunshine and the beaches.

*******

Is that Donald a REAL dummy?

I have looked again and again at this picture, which is said to show Donald Trump meeting Nigel Farage in Manhattan. And I grow less and less sure that the man with the weird coiffure is, in fact, the President-elect.

The hair is right, but the face and the grin are not. Nor is the open-necked shirt. I am tickled by the possibility that Mr Trump sent his hair to meet the Ukip leader, but decided not to go himself. Does he already have a squad of doubles, as Saddam Hussein did?

I wouldn’t blame him. And if Theresa May ever does manage to arrange a get-together, she should make sure it’s the real deal.

******

Do you ever wonder how wicked Russian bombers attacking Aleppo manage to hit a children’s hospital at least once a day, according to all media, whereas our brave forces in Mosul never kill any civilians at all? I call it downright miraculous.

*****

Finally... one brave bishop says sorry

Is the panic over? Are we beginning to realise that child abuse allegations – just like all other crimes – must be fairly investigated?

The resignation-prone Child Abuse Inquiry is in trouble precisely because it was based on a crowd-pleasing frenzy. The police are in difficulty because they forgot their job is open-minded investigation – assume nothing, believe nobody, check everything.

Now there is a flicker of good news from the Church of England too.

Trying to look tough on priestly child abuse when it had been feeble, the Church shamefully smeared one of its greatest figures – the late Bishop Bell of Chichester – as a paedophile. This was on the basis of a single, ancient uncorroborated allegation.

Since then, they have angrily refused to consider powerful expert evidence in his defence, or to admit that the secret kangaroo court which condemned Bishop Bell without hearing his side was at fault. Instead, they have attacked their critics, including me.

But there are at last signs that they too are recovering a sense of justice.

Yesterday, after months of shilly-shallying, the Bishop of Chelmsford apologised to me for falsely claiming that I and others had made hurtful comments about George Bell’s accuser, now an elderly lady.

The Bishop had made this baseless claim in the House of Lords, while trying to defend the Church’s behaviour.

It was typical of their refusal to recognise that they might be mistaken. They had a rigid groupthink which led them to believe the worst about their critics.

But the Bishop has now written to me to say ‘I am sorry that I said an untruth about you. I am seeking to make amends.’ And I have in turn forgiven him for what he said. I hope his courageous and Christian decision to break ranks with his rigid-minded colleagues will help to get a fair hearing for George Bell.

For I also learn that the Church is about to name the head of an independent review of these unproven allegations. About time. I took on this case more than a year ago because I fear that the old safeguards of English law are being destroyed. Without them, this country would be a tyranny.

Much of the damage was being done with public support, because of a mass panic about paedophilia. We all go on about how 17th Century witch-hunts and 20th Century McCarthyism were wrong. And so they were.

But would we recognise such things if they happened in our own time? Or stop them? Let’s see.

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13 November 2016 1:35 AM

I wish I thought our fashionably liberal ruling classes, throughout what remains of the free world, would learn from the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. But they won’t. They are incapable of learning anything, ever.

After years of taunting, spiting, ignoring and scorning the rest of us and our opinions, they have now created a monster. President Trump is entirely their fault. But they blame others.

I have politely warned the liberal elite for years that they were taking this risk. I have many times said and written to such people: ‘Please listen to me now. Or you will end up having to listen to someone much, much nastier in future.’

They paid no attention to my careful dissection of their wrong policies. With very few exceptions, they treated me as either mad or wicked, much as they treat your opinions and concerns.

On they ploughed with their mass immigration, their diversity and equality, their contempt for lifelong, stable marriage, their refusal to punish crime, their mad, idealistic foreign wars, their indulgence of drugs, their scorn for patriotism, their schools and universities, turning out graduates with certificates they can barely read.

And on they went with their destruction of real jobs, promising a new globalised prosperity that never came. Millions have just had too much of this.

Even now the liberals squawk and gibber in a state of disbelief. They hold daft placards saying ‘Love Trumps Hate’, as if they have not for years hated the secret, inarticulate people, living in parts of the country they never visit and barely know exist, who have finally let rip with a yell of resentment and rage.

This yahoo, this bully, this groper, a man who threatened his opponent with jail, he surely cannot be preparing to live in the White House? Yes, he is. Those pictures of Barack Obama treating him with polite respect, they cannot be true? Yes, they are.

These ridiculous people, who have never wondered how others have viewed their own side’s billionaire-financed election victories in the past, are actually holding demonstrations against the result. I loathe Mr Trump for his coarseness, his crudity, and his scorn for morals, tradition and law. I am as sorry that he has won as they are, and fear that Britain will have its own Trump before long. But I can at least say that I tried to prevent it. They brought it about. We must all now wonder if he is what he claims to be, or just another politician prepared to say anything to win office, just a bit more shameless than the rest.

Neither of these possibilities is good. If he is what he says he is, and keeps his promises, then he is bound to do grave damage to the peace and stability of the USA.

The simplest test of that will be whether he tries to put Hillary Clinton in prison, the promise he made that most pleased his supporters. If he does not, then he is like a medieval wizard who has conjured up the Devil and now does not know how to send him back where he came from.

Mr Trump has so stirred the mob that they cannot be relied on to go home if he fails them.

They want the change and the revenge they were promised.

If they see that they will not get them, they will instead rally behind figures who will make Donald Trump look like John Major.

And this campaign has done so much damage to the USA, to its tolerance, to respect for the rule of law, to civility, that there is no telling where this may stop.

*******

Surely the most moving words written or spoken by anyone in the past year were Leonard Cohen’s message to his one-time lover Marianne Ihlen, when he learned that she was dying: ‘Know that I am so close behind you that, if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.’ And so he was, as we learned on Friday.

Set that beside the florid, bombastic attempts of politicians and preachers to move us, which fail. Note that almost every simple word has only one syllable.

What makes it so powerful is that he meant it.

*********

Yes, it's bitter - but Amy's new thriller is utterly brilliant

As long as you keep your eyes closed through the opening credits (which feature several rather large naked women doing performance art), by far the best film of the year is Nocturnal Animals, starring Amy Adams, left, and crammed with real suspense.

As a bonus, the film is also a strong, if bitter, argument in favour of constancy and fidelity, things Hollywood hasn’t always been keen on lately.

Brace yourself for a cold, dark winter

This could be the winter when our crazed policy of closing coal-fired power stations and building windmills finally produces the power cuts that we richly deserve. In a way, I hope it is. It might make us wake up before things get much worse.

Green dogma is quite a bit dafter than the beliefs of the Mormons that fashionable people like to mock. That is why I call these fanatics ‘Warmons’.

But it has taken over the minds of our politicians and civil servants to such an extent that – on this issue – our official policy is as crazy as anything in North Korea.

Let me sum it up. On the basis of an unproven theory about global warming, we are shutting down perfectly sound, high-capacity, coal-fired power stations and instead peppering the country with windmills that tend not to work when it is cold.

This is unhinged anyway. But since China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks, and we share the same atmosphere as China, this action does no good, even if you believe the theory.

In any case, our ability to cope with big surges of demand in a cold winter gets less all the time. Our nuclear generators are near the end of their lives.

France’s nuclear stations, which often fill the gap by sending French power under the Channel, are having problems of their own just now.

It could be that the only way to meet demand will be by activating reserve banks of diesel generators now on standby, perhaps the most polluting form of power there is.

The closure of coal-fired stations should stop now, and we should also immediately build new gas-fired plants in defiance of the Warmon fanatics. Our exit from the EU actually makes this much easier.

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10 November 2016 4:06 PM

sounds better without vision. I should have noticed the curious up-the-nostrils angle of the camera, which generally means the person employing it wants to make you look stupid. I doubt if it was intentional in this case, but even so, it's no fun to watch for any length of time.

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09 November 2016 3:55 PM

Today , for the second time in five months, a left-wing elite paid the price of ignoring, for many years, the warnings of civilised and tolerant conservatives. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been, when trying to debate politics with readers of the Guardian and the New York Times.

To suggest to them that mass immigration is risky and destabilising; to urge that the married family needs to be supported, not dissolved; to say that education needs more rigour, discipline and selection; to advocate the deterrent punishment of crime rather than its indulgence; to suggest that pornography and swearing may damage civility; to object to attempts to abolish national borders and sovereignty; to say that violent liberal intervention in foreign countries is dangerous and wrong… any or all of these things has earned me a patronising sneer, a lofty glance, a dismissal as if I am some sort of troglodyte who has got into the room by mistake.

I said (as I recorded here a few weeks ago) to such people that they should listen to me while they could. I was content if they would only listen to me and moderate their policies. I did not even seek to wrest power from them, if they would only moderate their dogmatic revolutionary drive. I believed (and still believe) that they had made a mistake even on their own terms, that they could not possibly want the consequences of what they were doing. In the end, this was the Weimar Republic and they were courting a grave risk that they would eventually drive people too far. The response was sometimes personal abused, sometimes total, frozen indifference, very, very occasionally a brief, fairly uncomprehending attempt to see my point which came to nothing.

Well, now we have what I warned of. I don’t like these deep and increasingly spiteful divisions. I don’t like the crumbling of old constitutional conventions and the increasing treatment of opponents as enemies. I fear where this might lead. I have no desire to fight my fellow countrymen.

But all I can say is that I told you so. I cannot see what I can actually do, except try not to make things worse. Actually, my willingness to listen sympathetically to some of the worries of the Remainers has met with total indifference too. I doubt if one in a thousand of them even knows that I disapprove of the Referendum and that I think they had a case at the High Court. Even now they are so self-righteous they cannot imagine any opponent giving them the consideration they would never give in return. People who think their own opinions make them virtuous have the most closed minds of all. But I’ll carry on trying.

Sick as I am of this behaviour, it has not sent me over the edge of rage and into unreason. I refused to be beguiled into supporting Donald Trump, a yahoo and braggart whose views possibly coincide with mine on two or three things. It seemed absurd to be expected to support Mr Trump because I also did not support Hillary Clinton, a woman lost in a sea of money and liberal delusions, who has somehow persuaded herself that war is good. The same process works backwards. Neither will do. I have said it before, but it bears saying again. I don’t buy goods I don’t want, just because the shop involved has nothing I do want.

Voting is not a duty in such circumstances. If only people had the sense to see it an d act accordingly, not voting is a much higher duty. If neither of these terrible candidates had achieved more than 15% of the vote, how could they claim any serious mandate for the things they want to do. Yet, without resistance, the two halves of America agreed on one thing, That it was better to vote for disaster than not to vote at all.

Disaster? Hillary’s war policy in Syria would certainly have been one. Mr Trump’s economic policy, such as it is, which we don’t really know, and his general lack of respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers, threaten a different sort of catastrophe. I cannot see this ending happily. His other promises may also prove hard to keep. Those old stories about wicked necromancers raising demons, and then not being able to send them back where they came from, seem to me to be metaphors for modern-day political alchemists who raise huge hopes which they know they cannot satisfy, so summoning into being crowds which can all too easily become mobs, and will not go home when asked. What then?

Catastrophes happen in real life. I have seen them in Russia and elsewhere. Jobs gone, homes gone, savings wiped out between supper and breakfast, shortages of everything from milk to electricity. People survive. But it’s not very nice. Just because your entire life hitherto has been lived in peace, stability and security, doesn’t mean this is guaranteed to last forever. It could be you, ten years’ hence, selling your worldly possessions at the roadside (as in the opening scenes of ‘The Third Man’) to stay alive.

Someone has cut the ropes, and we are adrift on a strange, sinister, powerful current towards an unknown destination which it might be better never to reach at all. The liberal democracies have exhausted their form of government, which is increasingly using democracy to reject liberalism, but in an angry and impatient way. This, no doubt, is due to the policies pursued by our existing rulers for 50 years. But I do not think that will make the experience any more comfortable. Anger and contempt for your opponents are poor foundations for civilised government.

There is little we can now do to change this fate. It would be like paddling with your hands to fight the force of the Gulf Stream. Maybe Mr Trump will turn out to have been kidding us. Maybe he will surround himself with advisers of brilliance and subtlety, who will prove to have mastered the problems of reintroducing protection in a world governed by open borders and increasingly dominated by China. Maybe all that stuff about jailing his opponent was just talk. Maybe, despite all those years of, er, locker-room behaviour Mr Trump will turn out after all to be a Christian gentleman in office upholding the ancient virtues. I do hope so. But forgive me if I decline to be optimistic.

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13 October 2016 4:28 PM

My prophecy department has suggested that I should write about the fall in the Pound Sterling. I feel very much entitled to do so as have been standing on the platform with my watch in my hand, drumming my fingers and waiting for this particular long-expected event to come steaming in, for some time now.

Rather more than three years ago, I wrote the following:

‘..One of the things which constantly strikes me about modern Britain is that there must be many people who would actually quietly like to see the collapse , or at least the shrinkage, of the currency. They cannot hope to pay off their debts in any other way .The same is true of the government, which has no idea how it will manage its deficit, and borrows more each day, an action no less stupid than Weimar Germany’s incessant printing of worthless money. How convenient a large inflation would be for them.

‘Could anyone do such a thing deliberately? Possibly. The book (‘When Money Dies’, which I was reviewing at the time) quotes but does not endorse suggestions that both the Bolsheviks and some of the Warsaw Pact states deliberately used hyperinflation to destroy the hierarchies, the certainties and the middle classes which stood in their way. I have seen no proof of this, but it is not incredible, and we all know John Maynard Keynes’s attribution to Lenin of the (justified) belief that if you wish to destroy a nation, you first debauch its currency. It is also a very good way of destroying the power and influence of the independent middle class, who are the mainstay of any truly free and law-governed society, and the reliable regiments of conservatism.

‘But of course those who are in charge of all these things are not Bolsheviks.

‘They are ordinary politicians, far too stupid to be so well-organised or directed. It is just an accident, a bungle, an unintended consequence by people too dim and short-sighted to understand that bills have, in the end, to be paid somehow. I am not sure whether that makes it any better, though. The results will still be very bad.’

And also this :’ It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness. Why do they do it?

It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a government which never had any ideas in the first place. As far as I can find out , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t actually say ‘The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency’. Maynard Keynes rather hesitantly attributed it to the old monster. But it’s true, whoever said it. Since Gold-backed currencies gave way to paper, man has had to have faith in banknotes – so much faith that perhaps he hasn’t had the strength to have faith at the same time in God, who is considerably more credible than the average Cabinet or Central Bank.

He has to believe absolutely that the pretty blue, green or pink beer-token in his wallet is worth the goods which he purchases with it, and so does the shopkeeper who accepts it in return for those goods. He has to believe with all his heart that the columns of figures in his bank account stand for real value, along with the price he thinks he can get for his house if he sells it.

Well, this is coming to pass, and it is most provoking to be told that it is ‘caused’ by the referendum vote to leave the EU. No doubt this event was the trigger for the rapid slide of Sterling. But that was because the markets were waiting for such a trigger, and no doubt a lot of currency dealers, by gambling on a ‘Leave’ vote, did well in the money markets by betting on a post-referendum drop.

Sop now it has become established wisdom, and it may even be that, because the media are used by the markets to bring about little jumps and falls in the ratings of stocks or currencies, we will now see a constant link between the two, with each stumble and shudder along the road to exit being followed or accompanied by a lurch in the currency.

But this is correlation, not causation. Those with savings have known for years that inflation has been eating into their carefully hoarded stores of wealth, pensions included, thanks to the virtual abolition of interest and the repeated raids on pension schemes by Labour and Tory chancellors, which have nearly killed off what was once quite a solid sector of the economy, and left a lot of people wondering if they’ll die before the money runs out, or the other way round. . The message from investment advisers has been ‘put your money in something risky if you want to earn anything’. The old idea, that you could make a steady if modest income by just leaving the money on a reasonably safe deposit, is gone, I think for good.

But now those without savings, those living from hand-to-mouth and those (almost everyone under 60) with non-mortgage debts, must experience it too. For them it is a much more mixed experience. Their debts will visibly shrink, which they (and the government, whose debts will also shrivel visibly) will enjoy. But a lot of prices will rise, because we now import so much, and foreign holidays, which so many now regard almost as a right, will become swiftly costlier (perhaps it is time for British holidaymakers to sample the cheaper joys of the Crimea) . Our few export industries will be delighted. Those which rely on imported goods for their raw materials and fuel will not be. My guess, on the basis of what I think I know about our economy, is that a lower pound will hurt us more than it helps us.

Having experienced Harold Wilson’s famous 1967 devaluation (from $2-80 to £2-40) I am trained to laugh at political claims that it won’t hurt the money in your pocket. But in those days the government took direct responsibility for it, and was blamed for it. I wasn’t born in September 1949, when the Attlee government devalued from $4-03 to $2-80, it was a much more savage loss. But the country was well aware ( as it isn’t now) that it had run out of money and credit, and the humiliation just had to be absorbed. Fear of an even more humiliating repeat forced the Tories to abandon the Suez adventure seven years later.

Almost exactly 18 years before, in September 1931, Britain had come off the Gold Standard, Winston Churchill’s disastrous equivalent to the ERM crisis, unsustainable because we were broke and in debt, which we had not been in 1914 when he had helped get us into the Great War that ruined us financially. At that time the Pound sold for $4-87, roughly the same as the just under Five Dollars standard before 1914 (it is amusing to recall that transatlantic travellers reckoned in those days that the old English shilling was the exact equivalent of the American Quarter, which it also closely resembled in size and weight). During the US Civil War, in 1864, the Pound brought in almost ten dollars, peaking at $9-97. That’s war for you, so it is surprising that during World War One, while Britain was piling up a huge unrepayable (and still unrepaid) debt to the USA, the rate did not sink below $4-76, and fell only to $4-43 when hostilities ended, reaching $3-66 in 1920 before being dragged up again by the return to the Gold Standard.

During the 1930s the dollar-pound rate fluctuated between about 3-15 to above 5-00, but in 1940 was fixed at just above four dollars for the rest of the war.

These figures, like the old rate between Sterling and the abolished Deutschemark, always seem to me to give a true idea of how we were really doing against comparable economies in these periods. The answer is, increasingly badly. But the current account deficit, not the same as the trade deficit or the Treasury deficit, is now about as bad as it has ever been, and I can think of no peacetime circumstances when the fundamental features of the economy have ever been so bad, and had so little hope of sustained recovery. To blame the pound’s fall on the referendum is absurd.

features a discussion I had last month one evening in a pleasant bar and grill in my favourite US small town, Moscow, Idaho.

Moderating the discussion is my friend Doug Wilson, the former US Navy submariner, now a Calvinist pastor, educator, author and blogger whose debate on same-sex marriage (with Andrew Sullivan) I moderated in the same city a couple of years ago.

On both occasions I fell ill on the way there and was in danger of losing my voice, which is why I am chewing something in a rather preoccupied way before this discussion begins. If I'd realised my mastication was on record, I'd have swallowed whatever it was.

The other participant is the very interesting American writer, Walter Kirn, whose latest book 'Blood Will Out' has just achieved a great success, and whose novel 'Up in the Air' was filmed starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. I hope his lecture on the art of essay-writing, given the next day at the same festival (called 'Wordsmithy') , is also available on YouTube. It was very good indeed. If you want to read a good example of Mr Kirn's style, an autobiographical essay 'Lost in the Meritocracy' (later lengthened in to a book) is a good start. It is easily available on the web.